80% Chance Rescheduling Decision Will Be In Coming Months This is critical, as cannabis’ current Schedule I status by definition means that it does not have any proven medical uses, despite cannabis being legalized for medical purposes in an overwhelming majority of US states.
Head Of US FDA Says ‘No Reason’ DEA Should Delay Cannabis Rescheduling:
https://businessofcannabis.com/head-of-us-fda-says-no-reason-dea-should-delay-cannabis-rescheduling/
From March:
https://businessofcannabis.com/80-chance-rescheduling-decision-will-be-made-in-coming-months-as-dea-raises-concerns/
A few schedule 3 drugs include Codine, Morphine, oxycodone and hydrocodone from poppy's which are imported to the USA. Pharmaceutical companies can import and export whatever they want...
Take a company like Johnson and Johnson who basically started the opioid crisis back in the 90's:
Johnson family of companies became the leading maker of narcotics for popular opioid pills, a dominance achieved through decades of innovation, navigation of U.S. drug policy, and the cultivation of poppies in this remote haven on the other side of the world.
Johnson & Johnson’s supply chain began in Tasmania, an island 150 miles south of mainland Australia, where scientists in the mid-1990s altered the genetics of thousands of plants to engineer a “super poppy” that was particularly rich in opiates.
Tasmanian farmers grew the novel plants, enticed by flashy incentive prizes — a Mercedes, a Jaguar, a BMW — that a Johnson & Johnson subsidiary awarded for growing the best crop.
The poppies were then exported to the United States where another Johnson & Johnson subsidiary refined them into oxycodone and hydrocodone, and the narcotics were shipped as white crystalline powders to the nation’s pillmakers.
Critical to the globe-spanning effort were years of company lobbying to help persuade the U.S. government to loosen a key rule on narcotics imports, allowing the U.S. subsidiary to produce rising amounts of opioids out of Tasmanian poppies, according to records and interviews reviewed by The Washington Post.
From 2013 to 2015, near the peak of U.S. opioid production, the Johnson & Johnson subsidiary in Tasmania was harvesting thousands of acres of poppies and the U.S. subsidiary was manufacturing enough oxycodone and hydrocodone — the two most abused prescription opioid drugs — to capture half or more of the U.S. market, according to company documents.
So while Purdue Pharma, Mallinckrodt Pharmaceuticals and other manufacturers are often linked to the opioid crisis, it was two subsidiaries of Johnson & Johnson, a brand better known for baby powder and Band-Aids, that were producing the narcotics in many of the abused pills.